Hip to be square ... could you face a film about a Rubik's Cube competition? Photograph: Patrik Stollarz/AFP/Getty Images

Battleship, Monopoly and an American board game named Candy Land, which looks a bit like Snakes and Ladders, are all apparently set for the Hollywood treatment. Now it looks like an even more preposterous candidate could be set for the big screen: Rubik's Cube.

According to What's Playing's Hollywood Insider, the multicoloured puzzle may soon be the centrepiece of a new movie after the powerful talent agency CAA began shopping screen rights around studios. The toy has previously been featured in movies such as Dude, Where's My Car, The Pursuit of Happyness, WALL-E, Duplicity and even Swedish vampire horror Let the Right One In (and its recent US remake, Let Me In), but has not yet been the focus of its own feature. Storylines being touted around include a Rubik's Cube competition, which sounds like it took a lot less time to come up with than it usually takes to solve the puzzle itself.

If that all sounds a bit like scraping the bottom of a very deep barrel, you only have yourselves to blame – at least if you're willing to count as part of the not-so-great cinemagoing public. Of this year's top 10 films in the US (the situation is no doubt similar here) only two are based on original properties. The rest, Toy Story 3, Alice in Wonderland, Iron Man 2, Twilight: Eclipse, Shrek Forever After, How to Train Your Dragon, The Karate Kid and Clash of the Titans, are all either remakes or adaptations of previously existing source material.

What this tells Hollywood, apparently, is that brand is the key, whether or not the particular storyline really lends itself to being immortalised on celluloid. In the last couple of years we've also seen romcoms based on self-help books (He's Just Not That Into You), and in the wake of the success of The Social Network, we seem due for a wave of biopics about the founders of vaguely interesting techy websites. "They" will literally try anything.

On the other hand, an examination of Rubik's Cube's origins might actually make for some reasonably meaty material, since (like Facebook) there have been arguments over who originally came up with the idea. But that seems unlikely given that the makers of the toy are the ones hawking the rights. Perhaps someone should call Vincenzo Natali and ask him to direct a kid-friendly remake of his excellent 1997 sci-fi brainteaser Cube, this time featuring everyone's favourite lunchtime pastime (and possibly rather fewer deadly traps and hurdles). It couldn't be more tedious than that competition idea, could it?